Self-love is a tricky issue, and the right amount of it has always depended on perspective. I have healthy self-esteem; you’re a bit full of yourself; he’s a total narcissist. But in a world where you can buy a stick to hold your phone at the approved distance to take a photograph of yourself, has it all gone a bit too far?

In 2005 Steve Jobs gave his infamous commencement speech at Stanford University. It was six years before people would revisit it and hang on every word out of grief. Standing before the nation's next generation of innovators was the genius who never graduated from college. Jobs told the story of how he came to connect the dots of his past and went on to revolutionize technology.

“You never find a place that is total silence,” Mr. Kagge said. “I’ve been looking, and I have not found it.” Erling Kagge is a 54-year-old Norwegian explorer, author and publisher. The closest he came was trekking to the South Pole, which he reached in early 1993. He was alone in frozen isolation for 50 nights and days. Given a radio to make emergency calls, he’d tossed the batteries on Day 1. “When you start, you have all the noise in your head,” Mr. Kagge said, but by the end “you feel your brain is wider than the sky. You’re a guy being part of this bigness, this greatness. To be alone and experience the silence feels very safe, very meaningful.”